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Crossref: the sustainable source of community-owned scholarly metadata

https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00022

Article · January 2020

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Crossref: The sustainable source of community-owned scholarly metadata

Published in Quantitative Science Studies (2020), this paper describes the scholarly metadata collected and made openly available by Crossref—its history, scale, content types, and role in the research ecosystem.

Strategists

Understand why Crossref metadata is foundational scholarly infrastructure. The history, governance, and community model that make Crossref a sustainable, neutral, member-owned source of scholarly data.

Decision-makers

Know what’s in the metadata and what it enables. 106 million records, 13 content types—not just bibliographic basics but funding, licences, citation links, corrections, and retractions.

Practitioners

Learn how to access Crossref metadata at scale. A technical overview of the REST API and OAI-PMH, with context on citation data provision and metadata quality trends.

What this paper covers

  • History and governance—how Crossref was founded in 2000 and why its member-owned, not-for-profit structure matters for long-term sustainability
  • Scale of the metadata set (in 2021)—over 106 million records across journals, conference papers, books, datasets, preprints, peer reviews, grants, and more
  • Richness beyond basic bibliographic data—abstracts, full-text links, funding and licence information, citation links, corrections, updates, and retractions
  • Role in the research ecosystem—how Crossref metadata directly supports scientometrics, research assessment, and scholarly communications research
  • APIs and access—the REST API and OAI-PMH as the primary routes to Crossref metadata at scale
  • Citation data—the evolution of Crossref’s citation data provision, including the move to open references
  • Metadata quality and curation—trends in completeness and accuracy over time, and plans for improvement

Read the full paper

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Format
PDF
Published
1 January 2020
Estimated reading time
28 minutes

Authors

Cite as

Hendricks, G., Tkaczyk, D., Lin, J., & Feeney, P. (2020). Crossref: The sustainable source of community-owned scholarly metadata. Quantitative Science Studies, 1(1), 414–427. https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00022

CC BY 4.0

Topics

Metadata Infrastructure Persistence

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Page maintainer: Dominika Tkaczyk
Last updated: 2020-January-01